Chapter 3 Victoria #2
“You’re my wife. You can vomit on me anytime.”
“You should have put that in the vows,” Victoria said.
Ace spooned puttanesca into their dishes and they sat down at the table, side by side.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.
“It, the dumpster fire of my career? Or it like Rosemary’s Baby?” Victoria pointed to her stomach. “I think you impregnated me with the devil. I’ve felt perfectly fine this entire time and then, at the most inopportune moment, this little fucker decided to act up.”
Ace switched his focus from Victoria’s face to her abdomen. “You keep putting your mom through the wringer and we’re going to have words on the other side of this thing, you hear?”
Victoria froze, a rictus grin on her face.
“What?” Ace asked, putting down his fork.
“I’m going to be someone’s mom.” Victoria paused, the words heavy on her tongue before she uttered them. “What if this was a huge mistake?”
“My love,” Ace said, turning to her and placing his hand on her knee.
“I know I shouldn’t say this out loud…but I’m having second thoughts.” She looked at Ace. “Some people shouldn’t be mothers.”
“That’s true. But you’re not one of them.”
“I don’t like children.”
“Who does? From what I can tell, it seems like they’re always sticky and loud and demanding. But there must be a reason people keep having them.”
“What if the maternal instinct doesn’t kick in?”
“It will. I know we’re old and we don’t know the first thing about parenting, but we’re in it together.”
“What if I’m not any good?” Victoria looked at him searchingly, raw and exposed. “You know how my mom was. How she is.”
“You’re not her,” Ace said firmly. “You’re nothing like her.”
Victoria thought about her mother, who had birthed her with an enthusiasm that faded in steep increments once she failed to detect any commonality.
Family lore had it that as soon as Victoria began talking, she was brimming with questions, having found a voice for her insatiable curiosity.
Why are tongues wet? Why did they build the pyramids?
Where do we go when we die? But how? But why? Why, why, why?
Victoria’s mother met this onslaught with confusion and then fatigue and irritation.
By age five, Victoria had taught herself to read so she could find better resources to quench her thirst for information.
Victoria’s mother then operated with the polite remove of someone hosting a foreign exchange student in her home.
She would be gracious until the semester was over, but she wouldn’t try to bridge the language barrier or forge any sort of lasting bond.
Victoria met Ace’s gaze and swallowed hard. “What if this is the one thing we have in common?” Victoria asked him, speaking so softly her words were barely audible. “What kind of mother feels ambivalent about being pregnant?”
Ace took Victoria’s hands in his. “I’ve been on this planet for six decades. Not to toot my own horn, but there have been a lot of women who have wanted to procreate with me. But until I met you, I never thought about settling down and having a family. So, what does that tell you?”
“You have Alzheimer’s?”
Ace tipped his head back and laughed. “I fucking love you.”
Ace got up and scooped Victoria’s favorite gelato into martini glasses for dessert.
Then she picked up the rogue peony petals from the counter while Ace rinsed the dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher with the precision of a brain surgeon.
By the time they were turning off the music and shutting down the kitchen for the night, Victoria’s low-grade queasiness had subsided, and she was feeling almost like herself again.
Almost. This course correction made her hopeful that the horrendous incident earlier in the conference room was a one-off and she’d be able to go on acting like nothing was changing for at least another month, when she entered her second trimester.
After all, Victoria wasn’t even showing.
Until this afternoon, she hadn’t experienced any evidence that she was pregnant.
As they were getting ready for bed, Victoria ducked back into their closet and, in an attempt to feel like herself again, put on the white La Perla set that was Ace’s favorite.
She opened the bottom drawer that housed Ace’s skiwear.
It was where they hid their sex toys so their housekeeper didn’t have to face the discomfort of knowing too much about her employers.
Victoria rifled through GORE-TEX turtlenecks and heated ski socks until she reached a layer of equipment that wasn’t sold at base lodge mountain stores.
She was startled to see a tuft of fluffy fabric sticking out from under a two-pronged vibrator.
Victoria pulled out the unidentified object and puzzled over it for a moment: Was Ace exploring a furry fetish?
And then Victoria realized.
She marched into their bedroom. Ace was settled in their California king, reading glasses perched on his nose, Barbra Streisand’s thousand-page autobiography in his hands.
Victoria held it up. “I thought we said we weren’t doing this?”
Ace looked up and his face immediately became blanketed by a bashful grin.
“I know, I know. I’m sorry!” Ace said. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“But you put it with our sex toys?”
“It’s the only designated hiding spot in the house. Aside from the safe.”
Victoria nodded. She had to give him that.
“Besides,” Ace added. “It is a rabbit.”
Victoria looked down at the object in her hand, which she had only given a cursory look. Genus: stuffed animal. Species: bunny.
“We said weren’t going to buy anything,” Victoria said. Ace was Jewish and superstitious. Victoria was agnostic and in denial that they were having a baby. Agreeing not to fill the house with pacifiers and onesies had become an easy show of solidarity.
“Zei gezunt,” Ace said. “Now can we talk about your outfit?”
Victoria remembered that she was wearing nothing except Ace’s favorite bits of strategically placed French lace, but her mood had swung from lust into less prurient territory upon discovery of The Rabbit, not to be confused with her sex toy, the Rabbit.
Victoria looked down at the offending object.
It wasn’t that Ace had gone against his own insistence that they not buy anything ahead of the baby’s arrival.
It was the expression on Ace’s face that betrayed deep reserves of excitement that Victoria didn’t share.
“I’ll be right back,” Victoria said, eking out a smile to her husband.
She strode into the bathroom and looked at her reflection in the suspended mirror above the his-and-hers sinks. Then she peered up at the ink-black expanse of night visible through the skylight. Get it together, she told herself.
Victoria entered the toilet room where the Japanese commode heralded her arrival by opening its lid with a cheerful jingle.
She sank onto the heated seat and pulled down her lace thong, where she was stunned to see a vibrant Rorschach stain on the small triangle of available real estate.
She stared at the color, trying to make sense of it; usually period blood had a rusty-brown hue.
This was crimson like Snow White’s apple, cartoonishly bold.
It was a red carnation. It was a funeral flower.
Victoria called out her husband’s name, having the good sense to know that something was very wrong.